Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Nov 2, 2017 10 tweets 1 min read Read on X
"Why would a software company not just build that? It's a ~1 engineer job?" Software companies find it difficult to reliably staff one-offs.
Companies are not built to hire *one* engineer with lots of autonomy. They're built to hire 8 engineers and a team lead w/ a reporting line.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @patio11

May 1
A word to the wise. Don't invent a fictitious entity and attempt to open a bank account for it. The laws for bank fraud are drafted *broadly.*
But if you must, then don't do it while arguing for an expansion of the Bank Secrecy Act regime, because the existing BSA regime already orders your bank to inform on you.
But if you must, then don't do it while engaging in organized pressure campaign against firms with strong recordkeeping culture and an institutional desire to please government.
Read 15 tweets
Apr 15
My annual exhortation:

You, reader in the tech industry, should have plural million dollars of term life insurance coverage outside of that offered through employer.

You should also strongly consider own-occupation long term disability insurance.
For much more detail on this, see previous threads like, but I'll recap the most important bits.

Term life is a commodity product. Premium never changes after you lock in the term. Many people reading this will pay tens or low hundreds of dollars per million in coverage.
Read 20 tweets
Apr 14
Next up at MicroConf: @robwalling on How to use AI in SaaS.

This has been something of an undercurrent in a lot of conversations here. Lots of unease and anxiety about it, and IMHO a bit overblown w/r/t impact on SaaS specifically.

With that, Rob:
Rob did informal survey of a few hundred TinySeed companies (he runs a VC/accelerator which invests in many bootstrapped-adjacent software companies) to see how its actually getting deployed in production.

Taxonomy: six-ish ways that companies actually metabolizing it.
AI as product: Difficult for bootstrappers to keep up with the labs on LLM/etc development. Very, very tractable to make something downstream of the labs.
Read 25 tweets
Apr 6
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.

I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”

I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 31
Cannot underline this enough: send your human-prepared return to an LLM for review prior to signing it. The closest thing to free money.

It isn't even necessarily on the complex or hard bits, either. The first thing it surfaced me was an IL credit for elementary school tuition.
Also helps in the intermediate stages when you're dealing with accountant questions which might be, how do I say this nicely, "I thought I was hiring you to give me answers in this domain." Much higher bandwidth than multiple messages in an email thread at tax time.
"Why is he asking this?"
"Presumably he is attempting to qualify whether you have specified foreign financial assets."
"What does he really need to know?"
"Is the Tokyo condo held directly or in an LLC/etc"
"Held directly."
"OK so no you don't have those assets."
"Find authority"
Read 4 tweets
Mar 25
This is broadly important for governmental service design, tech industry UX design, and just understanding the world we live in.

There is an intense aversion to this fact in many quarters, and *it is a fact.* One of best reasons to work retail / a CS job is you'll learn it hard.
Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.

We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.
Read 10 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(